Yes, I know that you'd need a way to change it. But why do you think it wouldn't work without being able to clear the logs?

It'd work, just not as intended. It would become a message board for all official, above board, nice discussion. If the people on a council wanted to speak freely without being quote-mined or potentially even metagamed by a person who wasn't even at a meeting means that without features to ensure confidentiality I would personally not even bother with the system 90% of the time, and just remake conversations when new people join.

Logged

22:34 - Roran Hawkins: Radovid's like you22:34 - Roran Hawkins: but then insane22:34 - Roran Hawkins: Dijkstra is like you

It'd work, just not as intended. It would become a message board for all official, above board, nice discussion. If the people on a council wanted to speak freely without being quote-mined or potentially even metagamed by a person who wasn't even at a meeting means that without features to ensure confidentiality I would personally not even bother with the system 90% of the time, and just remake conversations when new people join.

Maybe some kind of entourage could allow you to remove old messages in that case, and possibly also try and recover lost ones? Then you could still have the potential of old information coming back to bite someone, but you could take measures to make it less likely to happen.

Maybe some kind of entourage could allow you to remove old messages in that case, and possibly also try and recover lost ones? Then you could still have the potential of old information coming back to bite someone, but you could take measures to make it less likely to happen.

The issue is that as soon as you add randomness, it goes counter to all other conversation mechanics. By choosing to use an official conversation rather than a private room, all you are doing is allowing people who join at a later date to have a definite, or a chance to see what everyone else said. Manually making new conversations & having to work out which conversation contains what you're searching for (Ie: Council Mk V) is often worthwhile to avoid running the risk of someone who wasn't there knowing what you said.

Also, generally speaking things are more interesting when you have some degree of polarity between the official, main realm court & private conversations. Any depth to what the characters are doing can be lost behind a wall of making everything that is said sound proper.

Logged

22:34 - Roran Hawkins: Radovid's like you22:34 - Roran Hawkins: but then insane22:34 - Roran Hawkins: Dijkstra is like you

I like the idea of having the ability to tie conversations to realm positions, but the rest? Less so.

First off, I really don't like the idea of a real time OOC chat. Recently we've been in a bit of conflict, and most messages are going through my character. Though I'm checking the game frequently and responding to my own people, I haven't had the time to respond to a lot of other people. (Even with someone that I contacted personally, I haven't had a chance to respond to them in a couple of weeks). I was speaking briefly with one of their leaders who kept responding really quickly, so I eventually said bollocks to it and went to bed. Haven't had time to respond all weekend. There has to be some ambiguity between whether someone is too busy to respond for OOC reasons or whether you're just being ignored ICly. I'm putting inconsequential conversations to the sidelines, and I'd rather not have people moaning about xyz because I have the time to respond to some people, but not all as quickly as they would like.

How so? OOC would not be a forced thing, you can choose to join it or not at anytime. Nor would it be tied to your characters so people would only be able to link it to them if you are going around revealing whom you play.

As for inter-realm diplomats, I'm not entirely sure. It might be nice to not have to send minor characters out to establish contact with foreign realms, but other than that it seems like more of a headache. I suppose the diplomats feature could be used as a way to arrange meetings or whatever, but any usage beyond that might detract from the more enjoyable parts of the game.

Diplomats aren't a "feature" simply a way of saying those realm titles that you wish to have access to specific realm-realm conversations.

As for internal usage of title-based conversations, I'd be very hesitant. If at one point, 4 people were speaking on a council and saying some not nice things, anyone who would join that conversation would then gain access to the entire chat's logs. You'd need to find a way to change that, else I for one would rarely ever use it.

You would have control in the message management system to determine if new characters to a conversation have access to the history before they joined. I would also consider having an option about if characters that are removed keep access to the history of the thread. I haven't checked if Tom's current implementation already has code for that but I know it was always part of his plan, and is rather trivial to implement.

Else you could always just use your common sense and CLOSE a message thread and reopen with new members if you really needed to keep something secret. Thread owners always have the option to kick everyone out of a thread after all.